Breakfast at Tiffany's; Other Voices, Other Rooms

Paired in this handsome Modern Library omnibus edition are two literary touchstones from Truman Capote's extraordinary early career. Of all his characters, Capote once said, Holly Golightly was his favorite. The hillbilly-turned-Manhattanite at the center of the transcendently popular novella Breakfast at Tiffany's shares not only the author's philosophy of freedom but also his fears and anxieties. For Holly, the cure is to jump into a taxi and head for Tiffany's; nothing bad could happen, she believes, amid "that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets." Other Voices, Other Rooms, the semi-autobiographical debut novel Capote published as a 23-year-old prodigy, begins as 13-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to rural Alabama to live with his estranged father—who is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his eccentric family and finds a kindred spirit in a defiant little girl, inspired by Capote's best friend Harper Lee.